Italy Plans to Push Ahead with High-Speed Train Line Under the Alps

Italy High Speed rail, Europe Rail, Italian Landscape, Northern Italy, Trains Europe Image (cc) Marco Caccoza on Wikimedia Commons

Claims of the economic revitalization that the line could bring have also failed to convince many. One of the activists protesting the development, Doriana Tassotti, told the BBC that “All the data shows that it’s sheer madness to build this line, it’s simply not necessary because the existing railway works perfectly fine. The number of passengers and the quantity of goods being carried on it is falling. And if you really want to travel to Paris these days it’s cheaper to fly anyway.”

As activists, many affiliated with the NO TAV movement, continue to be arrested in the area, the Guardian reports there are signs that Monti’s government is set to push ahead with the railway as “[o]fficials are due to expropriate a stretch of sloping grassland near the Alpine village of Chiomonte, outside Turin, where work will begin on Italy‘s side of the border. The first planned excavation is of an access tunnel to allow geologists to test conditions.” The results of these tests appear unlikely to have an impact on the significant and longstanding concerns of many in the area.

Via The Guardian and the BBC